Should NASA go to Mars or back to the Moon?

Speaking of sitting back and allowing the human race to die out I can still remembering reading the novel “On the Beach” where a nuclear war had kill off all of the population in the North Hemisphere and enough radiation was drifting slowly into the Southern Hemisphere to kill off all of humankind.

As a teenager I can still remember talking to myself as the author had the total population of Australia just sit around and prepared to meet their fates.

I then saw no reason given the situation as set up by the author why breeding groups of humans could not had been gotten by this short term choke point and they did not even try to do so in the book.

The thinking as express by the author of “On the Beach” and a number of the posters here is completely foreign to my mind set.

And how many survivalists are there with moldering bomb shelters? How many people wasted their life's savings preparing for Y2K?

There are good arguments for manned exploration of space, and for colonization, but I don't find "spread the genome, the sky is falling!" to be particularly convincing.

For example, figuring out how to create a sustainable artificial environment could have any number of applications here on Earth.

You pointed out the big difference - space and extraEarth colonies have numerous applications which the bomb shelters didn't.

(Though I will say that I've been in several bomb shelters which now make excellent storage sheds, so even that can be said to be useful.)

Cycloptichorn

Once more let drill this into you given the known history of the planet there is a one hundred percent chance that sometime in the future the conditions on earth will not allow human life to exist!!!!!!!!

Second you buy insurance hoping you will never need it. You hope that you will never had a bad car accident and that you will never need to used your home insurance.

I live in South Florida where I had already had one home wipe out on me by a hurricane so I would be a fool to just hope that no other major storm hit in my life time and given the history of this planet the whole human race is in a similar situation.

Yes the fall out shelters was not needed during the cold war but we did came damn close to all out nuclear war and having such shelters did made sense.

Remember Biosphere2?

And that little fun so call experiment had what possible connection to having real long term moon and other bases that are self contain off earth??????

But our experiences have not prepared us to understand the scale of what we are talking about. The probability of the Earth having a super major catastrophy in the next million years is less than one percent based on the last one being 600+ million years ago (and even that one did not destroy all life). Modern Homo Sapiens has been on Earth for 100,000 years. This is so far out of the scale of your hurricane or car accident analogy that people have trouble perceiving it. We misjudge the risk because we can't understand the numbers. The cost for your insurance policy is very high. You are asking mankind as a whole to give up a lot of short term (next 100 years) gain in all sorts of fields in order to obtain an insurance policy that is virtually worthless in terms of risk - reward ratio. Use all that money to help the real humans alive today rather than the theoretical humans of the future. Of course advances in medical or energy technology today could result in savings that would make the luxury of a space program affordable, so it could be a win-win.

One purpose of that experiment was to develop prototypes for space habitats, exactly what you propose.

You are, once again, not taking into account that the very existence of modern man has greatly increased the number of catastrophes that can occur. You can't measure probabilities of catastrophe up against purely natural occurances.

Cycloptichorn

Your argument crumbles after 60 seconds when one realizes that Biosphere was not done by a credible organization with the funding to sustain it.

I would re-figure those claims as Yellowstone or a similar event is far far more likely to occur in the next few thousands years then your estimates.

And it only take one such event to just ruin your day.

Sorry it was a nut with more funds then common sense and have nothing to do with setting up real self contain settlements.

Second engineer an event might be of such a nature as to allow some people to survive on the earth surface afterward however it would then be nice if high tech help could then flow in to the survivors.

It could be the different between going back to the caves or being able to rebuild in a few generations.

It wasn't so much an argument as a statement that we can do this kind of research on Earth without having to build space colonies.

As such studies are only useful or meaningful for off the earth colonies I do not see your point at all.

If you not going to have off the earth colonies there is little or no reason to do such studies in any case.

That's the point of performing the experiments away from Earth. If I recall correctly, the Biosphere2 experiment ended up being contaminated by external input. (Or maybe the external input was deliberate? I don't recall exactly.)

But that's an argument for having things run by disreputable organizations. It isn't an argument against running this kind of project on Earth rather than Mars. So what would you think about a Biosphere III project run by NASA?

If I remember correctly the project were a con job where a very rich man who heart was in the right place was taken for a ride.

science done by people of ill repute is worth less then stuff done by people who are trusted.



I think that NASA was done after Apollo, and should be shut down. I think that there should be a good biosphere project, it should be a government-NGO joint project. NOAA should be the government representative.

From wikiped

Others called it "New Age drivel masquerading as science".[30] The Institute for Ecotechnics, which awarded Margret Augustine and other Biospherians their "science credentials", was shown by a CBC documentary to be nothing more than an art gallery and café in London.[31] John Allen did have mainstream credentials: a degree in Metallurgical-Mining Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.[12][32]

Further damaging the credentials of the participants, Marc Cooper wrote[33] that "the group that built, conceived, and directs the Biosphere project is not a group of high-tech researchers on the cutting edge of science but a clique of recycled theater performers that evolved out of an authoritarian " and decidedly non-scientific " personality cult". He was referring to the Synergia Ranch in New Mexico, an outpost of the Institute of Ecotechnics where indeed many of the Biospherians did practice improv theater under John Allen's leadership, and began to develop the ideas behind Biosphere 2.[34]

One of their own scientific consultants came to be critical of the enterprise, too. Dr. Ghillean Prance, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, designed the rainforest biome inside the Biosphere. In a 1983 interview, Prance said, "I was attracted to the Institute of Ecotechnics because funds for research were being cut and the institute seemed to have a lot of money which it was willing to spend freely. Along with others, I was ill-used. Their interest in science is not genuine. They seem to have some sort of secret agenda, they seem to be guided by some sort of religious or philosophical system."[35]

[edit] Psychology and conflict
Much of the evidence for isolated human groups comes from psychological studies of scientists overwintering in Antarctic research stations.[36] The study of this phenomenon is "confined environment psychology", and according to Jane Poynter[37][38] not nearly enough of it was brought to bear on Biosphere 2.

Before the first closure mission was half over, the group had split into two factions and people who had been intimate friends had become implacable enemies, barely on speaking terms.

The faction inside the bubble came from a rift between the joint venture partners on how the science should proceed, as biospherics or as specialist ecosystem studies. Was the Biosphere a scientific experiment or a business venture? Or perhaps just an enormous art installation? There was a high-powered Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC), and they, of course, felt that Biosphere 2 was about science, or else what were they there for? The faction that included Poynter felt strongly that they should be making formal proposals for research for the SAC to evaluate. The other faction included Abigail Alling, the titular director of research[39] inside the bubble, and who sided with John Allen in blocking that move. On February 14, the entire SAC resigned.[40] Time Magazine, wrote:

Now, the veneer of credibility, already bruised by allegations of tamper-prone data, secret food caches and smuggled supplies, has cracked ... the two-year experiment in self-sufficiency is starting to look less like science and more like a $150 million stunt.[41]

Undoubtedly the lack of oxygen and the calorie restricted nutrient dense diet[42] contributed to low morale. The Alling faction feared that the Poynter group were prepared to go so far as to import food, if it meant making them fitter to carry out research projects. They considered that would be a project failure by definition.

The external management could certainly have done more to defuse the intolerable situation inside. Instead they provoked the Poynter faction further by putting Sally Silverstone in charge of day-to-day agricultural operations, replacing Poynter.

In November the hungry Biospherians began eating emergency food supplies that had not been grown inside the bubble.[43] Poynter made Chris Helms, PR Director for the enterprise, aware of this. She was promptly dismissed by Margret Augustine, CEO of Space Biospheres Ventures, and told to come out of the biosphere. This order was, however, never carried out.

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